Exercise - Vintage Sportsman

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Exercise Vintage Sportsman - Newly Old

The long road back to my youth

September 28th 2009 05:38

There are three principal stages on the road to reversal, by which I mean the dream of a spreading middle-aged man to return to the health, wellbeing and flat stomach of his younger days. Those steps, one might say, comprise the journey from fit to fat and back again.

Stage one is the first step. Literally. It is not hard physically, but it takes great mental strength. Some spreading middle-aged men never manage step one.

Stage two is when you have slimmed down enough to discard the bicycle-style inner thigh protectors. I have never liked those things, but I liked chaffed thighs even less.

Stage three is the red-letter day that your stomach is, from any angle that you look at it, once again completely flat. What a day that would be, the hour-glass, as Auden said, whispering to the lion's roar.

Alas, not yet. I have lost 11 kilograms in nine months — I reckon I need to lose another nine kilograms to reach those once-charted heavenly waters. But as I prepared for a lunch-time jog today, the thought came to me that maybe I was at stage two. Maybe I was ready to go bicycle-pantless. Yes, it was worth a try.

I don't know why I dislike those cycling shorts so much. Maybe it's just that running shorts are so light and liberating that anything else seems restrictive. Indeed, as I set out today I immediately had a sense of freedom of movement that I hadn't felt for years.

And back home now after my 40-minute run I am delighted to report that I found some decent antiseptic cream in my bathroom cabinet. I should be able to walk normally again in a few days.

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Posted By: Chris Champion - Category: Exercise, Vintage Sportsman

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Old dogs, new tricks and bad hats

September 24th 2009 04:21

The trouble with this hat ...

I had been meaning to buy a hat, of the baseball cap style, for some time. The trouble with Melbourne, an Australian city of almost four million people renowned for the world's most capricious weather, is that a 30-minute run often involves sun, rain, wind, hail and tempest, not necessarily in that order.

I have been a jogger for three decades, but I never found that I needed a hat until I moved to Melbourne a couple of years ago. Melbourne has a way of throwing rain your way with little warning. I wear glasses and the world goes spotty. Then, in a matter of seconds, the clouds scatter and a fierce sun assaults you.

Then it will probably start snowing.

Yesterday was hat day. I left home and headed for the shopping precinct with the sole purpose of finding a hat to keep the sun off my head and the rain off my glasses. I was aiming for a department store, and was almost there when I passed a smaller shop, inside of which I saw baseball caps. This, surely, was an omen. In I went and selected a white cap to optimise sun reflection, and proceeded to the payment counter.

Arguably I should have heard a warning bell when I heard the price, but I was a man on a mission, a focused creature. In my mind, my hat and I were already an item. A pact had been signed, an irrevocable and lasting partnership dedicated to health, wellbeing and dry specs. I never questioned that this was a hat I could trust. Even if it only cost $2.

An hour later, my new hat and I went for a run. It was a lovely spring day, the sort of glorious weather which, when you find it in Melbourne, you know will change any minute. For now, however, all was well with my world.

... is that it kept sliding off ...

Except my hat. It wasn't windy — breezy perhaps, but not the stuff to make a sailor happy. Yet it was enough to threaten constantly the removal of my hat from my head. I tried to tighten the strap, but it was secured by a plastic buckle arrangement which refused to hold. Cheap! My hat was cheap rubbish!

After running for some time with one hand on my head to hold my hat on, I gave up and turned it around, Lleyton Hewitt-style, so the wind wouldn't catch the brim. But that didn't work either, and in frustration I swept the blood thing from my head and carried it.

... even when worn Lleyton Hewitt-style ...

The relationship which had promised so much was over. It had lasted less than 10 minutes.

My plan was to throw the hat into the first rubbish bin I saw, but then I hatched the plan to take some photographs to go with my report.

So the pictures have been taken and the story has been told, and I will now throw my hat in the garbage.

... so I'm giving it the bum's rush.

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Posted By: Chris Champion - Category: Exercise, Vintage Sportsman

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The long and windy groan

April 26th 2009 07:55

A deed of epic endurance and heroism has been done here this day. Despite overwhelming difficulties, I can place a tick in today's box on my exercise schedule. Or at least, I will once I get the frostbite treated and regain use of my right hand.

This is about extreme weather conditions. Himalayan climbers would not venture out in this. The weather in Melbourne is so bad right now that it would panic some of the hardier kinds of igloo.

It wasn't so bad shortly after dawn, when my wife left on a trip to Toronto. "Whatever happens here, I expect it will be colder in Canada," she said. Bah!

By midday, a mini Ice Age had settled over my suburb, and if I had known the hardship I would have to endure on my 80-minute walk and run along the Maribyrnong River pathways, I would never have opened the front door, let alone broken down the wall of packed snow which had formed there.

They might have tools for dealing with this kind of thing in Canada — snow dynamite or a lance-shaped bulldozer perhaps — but I had to beat my way out into the howling gale using only my bare hands and strength of will.

The wind! Tall trees bent before it. America's Cup sailors fled in terror. As I lent forward at an angle calculated to prevent me being thrown on my back, my nose touched the ground.

Why even go out in such conditions, I hear you ask.

Well, it's all my wife's fault really that, while she sat comfortably in a warm cocoon at 30,000 feet, I should be out in conditions which would have shocked Shackleton.

She pleads with me to exercise regularly, you see. She uses subtly irresistible arguments about health and life quality and her keen desire to grow old together. It's the last one that gets me out the door on days like today.

The good thing is that, being on a plane to Canada as she is, my wife won't know, when she reads this, if I have slightly exaggerated the conditions. I haven't, of course. Well, maybe a teensy bit.

image: gerwc.com

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Posted By: Chris Champion - Category: Exercise, Health, Vintage Sportsman

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